Sunday, November 14, 2010

The Crew is Helped by the Villagers and Rebel Soldiers

(Continuation of Captain Estes's War Memoirs)

"Anyway, Swain could speak a little Italian butnone of the rest of us could speak Yugoslav orRussian or German or anything else so we justdepended on hand motions and what have youto kind of make our needs known. Well, fromthis particular place they took us to a largebuilding which turned out to be a hospital; I didn't quite understand why we were beingtaken to a hospital, but it became evidentthat the reason we were is because the hospitalhad a lot of rooms and a lot of beds and that'swhere they were gonna put us to sleep thatnight. So were all assigned a room or taken toa room and we felt good about where we wereand the circumstances we were in, and everythinglooked like it was gonna go along pretty good.

The next day we were taken outside and they putus on a cart and we all loaded onto the cart andthey assigned some men to go with us, and we hadno idea where we were going, and we couldn'tspeak to 'em, but we began to go along thistrail or road. And it took us to a house where they stopped along the side of the road, and one of the men that was assigned to us as aguide or whatever, went up and knocked on thedoor and this man came out and they had some words and they told us to get out of the cart andwe got out, and two or three men came out of thehouse and they looked us over real good. Wedidn't know who they were, they didn't know who we were, but one of them went back in theback and came back with a goat and proceededto kill him and skin him; and they had a firegoing underneath a spit and they started cutting the goat up into pieces and put it on thespit, and this was gonna be our supper.

Well, I hadn't never eaten any goat that I couldrecall, but I was of a mind to try anything theygave me. Well, of course, the fire was not closeenough to the spit to properly cook the goat,and the goat came out half cooked, and they started taking pieces off the spit and handingit to us, and it was a new experience for me tonaw on something that was half done. It wassort of like trying to chew rubber, but I didn'tcomplain about it; I ate what they gave me.Then they took us to a room and we all laiddown in the room and slept.

The next day they got us up and we startedwalking now instead of being in a cart. Thesnow was covering the ground or coveringthe road, and we were going up a mountaintrail and evidently was going to lead usover the Alps, and we had about five menwalking with us. And we'd been walkingfor a few hours when we encountered anold man on a white mule or a white horsecoming down the trail that we were goingup, and he had behind him four or five women and they were all dressed in longskirts and they had these baskets on topof their heads. And when they came up tous, this old man stopped and he had a fewwords for the soldiers that were with us,and he had a wine skin that was on the horn of his saddle, and he took that looseand took it off and he handed it to one ofthe soldiers. The soldiers of course were notunused to drinking from a skin, so they knewexactly how to handle it, and they put itover their shoulder and drank some of it,and passed it onto some of the other soldiers, and finally it had gotten aroundto giving it to us. And I remember when I got ahold of it I tried to do like they did,and I got a mouth-ful of it and it wasjust like liquid fire in my mouth, it wasso hot. It was a very, very high percentageof alcohol, very condensed and we foundout that it was called Rocky, and they madeit from pear juice, and it wasn't unpleasantto taste, but it was strong as hell. So afterwe all had a drink and the soldiers had talked to the old man, then he went on hisway down the trail and we went on up the trail."(To be continued.)